The Death of Robert Lowellread it now!On this day in 1977, the poet Robert Lowell died at the age of sixty in the back seat of a New York City taxi. Lowell was on his way from JFK airport to his ex-wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, after a disastrous meeting in Ireland with his present wife, the writer and Guiness heiress, Caroline Blackwood.

10/13/1943

Lowell & the West Street JailOn this day in 1943 Robert Lowell went to jail for draft evasion. Lowell was barely published at this point, but because he came from a venerated Boston family the event made headline news. He would later turn the jail time into "Memories of West Street and Lepke," a centerpiece poem in Life Studies, the 1959 collection regarded by many as the most important book of American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century.

"By the time Lowell died at age sixty, he had been married and separated three times, had renounced his Protestant roots for what turned out to be a temporary obsession with Catholicism, and had spent much of his adult life in and out of mental hospitals. During his manic spells, he was overtaken by surges of larger-than-life emotion that ended up reflected in his poetry."

Salon.com: Audio RecordingsListen to audio recordings of Lowell reading "Skunk Hour" and "Dunbarton." From Random House's The Voice Of The Poet series.

Slate.com: "A Life's Study"Find a review of Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) which considers the poet's enduring legacy, and standing as "America's most important career poet":

"Lowell's story, of heretical, Promethean ambition dragged to earth and chastened, has struck a number of critics over the years as overly melodramatic, and Lowell, since his death, has been somewhat overshadowed by less self-aggrandizing contemporaries like Elizabeth Bishop or Frank O'Hara, who neither made inordinate claims for the authority of poetry nor a big fuss when those claims proved to be untenable. They left behind bodies of work, whereas Lowell, like Yeats and Milton and very few others, left behind the monumental narrative of a career, which may well, curiously enough, be remembered longer than any single poem he wrote. It is the entirety of that story —- the saga of an audacious maker struggling with the raw materials of history, personality, and language -— that gives so many of the poems their aura of courage and pathos."

The New York Review of BooksFind a selection of letters and articles written by and about Lowell in The New York Review of Books. Elsewhere on the website is a piece by Derek Walcott titled "On Robert Lowell." Paid access only.